The World Bank Group in 2013 made the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030 a central institutional focus and purpose. This evaluation examines how, and how well, the Bank Group has focused its support on poverty reduction over the past decade, and what lessons to draw from this moving forward. The lessons aim to strengthen the Bank’s country diagnostics, improve the design of country strategies, and build greater learning opportunities from program experience.

Agricultural water management projects
that take an inclusive, participatory gendersensitive
approach at all levels of the project
cycle help increase project effectiveness and
improve account of livelihood concerns of
women and the rural poor. Participatory
planning methods; creation of genderspecific
indicators; continuous monitoring;
and beneficiary-led impact assessment are
key features of this approach.

According to the latest census of 2011,
the urbanization level in India has increased from 27.8
percent in 2001 to 31.2 percent in 2011, and for the first
time, the absolute increase in urban population exceeded the
increase in rural population. India has different
administrative arrangements for rural and urban areas, which
are based on the 73rd and 74th amendments to the
Constitution of India respectively. Since the census towns

In the context of Romania’s push toward
sustainable and inclusive development, the government has
asked the World Bank to support the harmonization of public
investments financed by the European Union and the state
budget. The current report describes the national program
for local development (PNDL’s) framework and project cycle
and provides an overview of the program’s project portfolio
in 2014. It also draws a number of preliminary observations

Almost a decade after large land-based
investment for agriculture increased sharply, opinions on
its impact continue to diverge, partly because (positive or
negative) spillovers on neighboring smallholders have never
been rigorously assessed. Applying methods from the urban
literature on Mozambican data suggests that changes in the
number and area of large farms within 25 or 50 kilometers of
these investments raised use of improved practices, animal

This module provides guidance and a
comprehensive menu of practical tools for integrating gender
in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of
projects and investments in climate-smart agriculture (CSA).
The module emphasizes the importance and ultimate goal of
integrating gender in CSA practices, which is to reduce
gender inequalities and ensure that men and women can
equally benefit from any intervention in the agricultural

This paper uses a rural household survey
dataset collected in 2006 and 2008 to investigate the impact
of a market-based land resettlement project in southern
Malawi. The program provided a conditional cash and land
transfer to poor families to relocate to larger plots of
farm land. The average treatment effect of the program is
estimated using a difference-in-difference matching
technique based on propensity score matching; qualitative

This systematic country diagnosis (SCD)
for Chad aims to identify how to achieve the twin goals of
ending poverty and improving shared prosperity. It
acknowledges both: (i) the need for selectivity in pro-poor
interventions, and (ii) the inherent difficulty to do so
given the many competing binding reasons for poverty.
Selectivity means the identification of principal
opportunities for sustainable poverty reduction in the next

Countries everywhere are divided into
two distinct spatial realms: one urban, one rural. Classic
models of development predict faster growth in the urban
sector, causing rapid migration from rural areas to cities,
lifting average incomes in both places. The process
continues until the marginal productivity of labor is
equalized across the two realms. The pattern of rising
urbanization accompanying economic growth has become one of

The main objective of this Economic and Sector Work (ESW) is to identify opportunities for stronger linkages between domestic agricultural supply chains and the tourism sector in the OECS, and to outline priority interventions with potential to strengthen these linkages. Since this topic has been analyzed in a number of studies, the approach for this ESW is not to conduct yet another comprehensive study.

As part of a national experiment, in
2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property
rights reforms, including complete registration of all land
together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate
labor market restrictions. This study uses a discontinuity
design with spatial fixed effects to compare 529 villages
just inside and outside the prefecture’s border. The results
suggest that the reforms increased tenure security, aligned

This paper discusses how catastrophe
crop risk models can be used to assess food security needs
at the sovereign level for the purpose of risk transfer. The
rationale for a system to evaluate food security needs at
the national level is discussed. The role of technology and
remote sensing data availability as an enabler of
catastrophe crop risk models is discussed followed by a
description of the framework of catastrophe crop models for